Perhaps the whole Christian mythos is just too weird and contradictory to work in the feature-film format anymore
I can think of several recent TV series with overtly Christian themes—Preacher, Messiah, and Evil off the top of my head—but to find movies of comparable quality, like those mentioned by others in this topic, we have to go back decades
I’ve not seen the other 2, but Preacher has a heavy dose of criticism to it, more along the lines of Dogma… A great series.
One of the first scenes in Messiah is brown-skinned Jesus reappearing on Earth quoting the Qur’an on the steps of the Temple Mount
It upset all the people we’d expect it to upset and got canceled for being too controversial
Still worth a watch though
That was that Netflix show, right? Did it end on a cliff hanger or did they wrap up the story at least?
It’s sort of cliffhangery
but so many shows end like that now that I just think of it as part of the format
A show that ends with a good cliffhanger is better than one that’s wrapped up with a bad conclusion
But not the 20% of the German population that died during the 30 Years’ War while they did that bucking.
Or the 20% of the French population that attempted the same thing in the 16th century and failed. Among others.
Some groups failing when the Catholic church was more powerful doesn’t negate the millions of non-Catholic Christians that exist today. And that still ignores the Orthodox churches, some of whom have been around as long as if not longer than the Catholic church.
If they attempted to obliterate non-Catholic Christians, they failed.
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t trying to argue they succeeded.
To be fair, the first thing a new Christian sect does is define its rules and root out any heresy they can find.
Don’t forget the music. I have always been a hardcore atheist, but this track almost makes me want to convert…
My problem with evangelizing Christians (as an atheist) is that they focus on the wrong things. Someone comes up to me on the street saying “Jesus loves you” or “He died for your sins”, that means nothing to me. Why not focus on the things Jesus taught about compassion, empathy, the meaninglessness of material wealth? Those are things that might actually get an atheist interested in exploring the faith. My favorite movie is Cloud Atlas, and while it’s not explicitly Christian you could definitely see it that way. Movies like God’s Not Dead only pander to this persecution complex that Evangelical Christians in the US have. It’s not engaging because it’s completely ridiculous.
Except when they don’t
Yeah. It suffers in comparison to the book, and commits the cardinal sin of having a lily-white Jesus pilloried by decidedly swarthy folks, but in terms of Christian movies, it’s pretty standout for it’s thematic complexity, curiosity, aesthetic consideration, and faith.
My grandma’s church is 120 years old in Detroit. We used to go almost every Saturday evening. It’s a huge cathedral type building with a massive pipe organ. My dad actually played that organ.
Any song played on that organ and sung in that church is awesome. I think the echo or the accustics is what does it.
It’s was always a Polish church but it evolved into Mexican and and Polish. Midnight mass singing English, Polish, and Spanish Christmas carols is way cool. Can’t wait til the covids goes away and we can go to Midnight mass again.
That’s that dumb-as-shit show where they literally gave the central character an Arabic name which is the Islamic term that the false prophet will use to announce himself, meaning that for a huge portion of the global audience the series’s big twist was spoiled in the first trailer the moment the messiah character was introduced.
Same with the Gnostics which is my faith. It’s wild how much Christianity was about forcing one ideology over others. Like as much crap Islam gets, it has a really diverse jurisprudence by comparison to Christianity.
I think that in some cinematic traditions cinema is explicitly Christian. I’m thinking of post war Italian so for example picking on Fellini la Dolce Vita starts off with an image showing the ridicule of Jesus and ends up with a monstrous, dead Jesus symbol while in between the spiritual void of the main characters is examined through the lens of their lack of faith and their yearning. 8 1/2 does this with mental illness. And worse la Strada beatified Giulia Massina’s character through innocence, suffering, neglect, abuse and simple faith (I found it hard to watch).
Earlier neorealism also is full of Catholic faith.
So are lots of contemporary Korean films. It’s just they don’t resemble the Fundy tracts, and these are film versions of Chick tracts, above.
Talking off which, no love for:
Or
Christianity is stupid! Communism is good!
Also, the struggle to define an orthodoxy did characterise the early Jesus movements and later Christianity. But the range of beliefs they espoused were far more varied than the range varied Christianities do now. The first canon of gospel was Docetic, the first state with Christianity as the official religion was one of the eastern faiths (not orthodox, they come from the western church) based on descent from the holy family rather than bishops.
Catholicism, particularly Roman Catholicism, didn’t meaningfully exist until centuries later.
You can’t simply say that “Christian” movies suck because they’re propaganda. After all, some great pieces of cinema are, at their heart propaganda. eg. Casablanca, Triumph of Will, Birth of a Nation.etc. Personally, I have a soft spot for British wartime “message” films like Mrs. Minniver, Went the Day Well?, and A Matter of Life and Death(aka Stairway to Heaven). And it is silly to maintain that they are bad simply because you are not the intended audience, American evangelicals that want affirmation and to feel that they are bravely fighting against these awful atheists.
The original post seems to be mostly about how the editing and technical execution is sub-par and I wonder how much this might be because the filmmakers limit themselves to hiring like-minded crew and therefore just don’t have as many editors, lighting managers grips, etc to choose from.
Waiit, is this a setup for a critical reevaluation of Casablanca? I have heard that the stylistic innovations of “Triumph of the Will” and “Birth of a Nation” weren’t, and were instead stolen from more obscure, possibly less racist films.
